COACHELLA VALLEY, Calif. -- For Alicia Silva, a single mother with three kids and three jobs, an iPad is out of reach.

Silva works as a part-time art teacher, seamstress and home-care provider, and like many hard-working parents, can't afford a tablet computer.

Sometime in the next few weeks, though, the Coachella Valley Unified School District will take care of that. It will issue an iPad to each of Silva's three children as part of a program that will provide them to all 19,000 students in the district, one of the state's poorest.

In that moment, "a part of the world" will rest in their hands, Silva said. "If they want to travel, they can travel through the iPad to see Europe, to see another continent ...They can research anything."

Coachella Valley Unified is one of small number of school districts buying iPads or other tablets for all their students. The district will issue iPads to all students – pre-school through high school – by November.

A tablet rollout of this scale would be a hefty undertaking for any school district, but it is especially ambitious in this Coachella Valley Unified, which estimates that about 90% of students live in poverty. Many of the area residents in this rural desert region work low-paying farming jobs, according to a recent study funded by The California Endowment, a private health foundation with a focus on under-served communities.

This widespread poverty only makes the iPad initiative more necessary, district Superintendent Darryl Adams said. In an increasingly wired world, technology has become more of a "civil right" than a privilege, Adams said.

"If you look at the haves and the have-nots, we are definitely in the have-not column," Adams said. "We've got to give the students some hope. We have got to give them something that makes them say 'We matter.'"

Coachella Valley Unified modeled its iPad initiative after McAllen Independent School District, another low-income district that invested in classroom technology on a widespread scale. This Texas district sits on the border with Mexico, and two-thirds of its students live in poverty.

McAllen Independent negotiated a three-year, $8.7 million lease of 23,000 iPads with Apple. Students are allowed to take the iPads home, and each devices is fitted with a tracking mechanism in case it is lost or stolen. A district-wide rollout was completed in March. Less than 2 percent of the iPads have been stolen or broken since the rollout, said Mark May, a McAllen spokesman.

Coachella Valley Unified has spent about $11 million of funding from a voter-approved bond, backed by property taxes, to purchase its devices. The district's financial plan is heavily dependent on increased funding from the state government, without which Coachella Valley Unified would immediately fall into deficit. In July, California enacted budget changes that vow to increase education funding, prioritizing poorer school districts, for the next eight years.

At least one larger district is taking on a similar project. In June, Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the nation, announced a plan to provide iPads for all 640,000 students by 2014.

Peter Cookson, manager director of Ed Sector, an education think tank in Washington D.C., said Coachella Valley and McAllen are pioneers, paving a path that districts can follow.

"We don't have the data to support some of the quasi-utopia projections," Cookson said. "Although, I would say the downside risk for (these districts) is pretty minimal, because kids love these things. They will be engaged in a way they've never been engaged before."